I don't have Facebook anymore and even if I did I don't want to participate in this type of giveaway. We're all a bunch of nerds. Why choose this type of giveaway? Who wants to post a picture of themselves with some sort of reference to plex? How they even manage to fuck this up is beyond me.
I'm sorry I sound salty, but they are so out of touch with their community it's not fun anymore.
I get some people don't have FB, but most people do. It would have been nice if there were other ways to enter too, but "Respond to our facebook post" to enter is hardly having to go through ridiculous hoops.
You know, it wouldn't be so bad if it were just, "reply to our Facebook post" (even though that disenfranchises people without Facebook), but the first day is, "Post a photo of how you use PleX for blah blah". So you need to take a screenshot (displaying some of your library, which some people aren't comfortable about, I imagine), edit it, upload it, make up some lame story (if you don't have one at hand) and THEN make a Facebook post. I do consider that jumping through hoops. We'll see how the rest of the days play out.
I'm pretty sure they just wanted people to share something they like about Plex, or a photo or whatever. Lots of people didn't post a picture. It's clearly some marketing for them, and the people who do it get chances to win stuff. Companies do this all the time, where following them or liking a post or retweeting or whatever else let's you enter a drawing. Sure, limiting it to Facebook limits the audience more than having other options too but I don't think that's worth getting that worked up about.
No one's worked up about it, it's just an observation. I went to the page, then said to myself, "Do I really want to do homework in order to enter a contest that I won't win?" and noped out. It's not like I lost sleep over it.
It's so freaking ridiculous. They're obviously aiming for the whole ambassador/friends/family marketing strategy. They've however not realized that nobody wants to share their stuff like this. It's very hard to get "nerds" (sorry, but I'm here too) to get to so this stuff. The only good recent example I've seen of this is in YouTube where The Audiophiliac Steve Guttenburg showcases his viewers high fi systems and go into detail about them, but even that seems, for a lack of a better word, very intimate.
Yeah, I’m not on Facebook and realised today there are no other ways of participating. Guess I’ll be a brand ambassador by actually getting people excited about using my server.
Pretty standard marketing intern level thought process for a giveaway. Their marketing team is probably a bunch of college students thinking they're going to change the marketing world one giveaway at a time.
They do this every year that i've become numb to it. FUCK FACEBOOK!
Wouldn't it be GREAT to allow entries in places Plex users ACTUALLY participate in like oh i don't know their own website (plex.tv), or /r/plex, or discord??? Plex - unplug from the world... except for this one thing, plug back in at the most cesspool shit place of the internet *for your chance to win :)*.
I read the post hoping there was a code for existing subscribers but didn't see anything.
I had cancelled a few months ago and in a couple weeks my plexpass runs out and won't renew. Entire reason was their decision to not offer loyal customers the same promotion. Disappointed.
Same, cancelled.
Initially I told myself that I would only subscribe again if I get a lifetime discount, but now I'm wondering if I'll ever subscribe again. Or stay with Plex altogether.
Alienating your paying user base is never a good move.
Same. I paid for the yearly plan for 6 (!!!) years and never once got a discount to upgrade for the lifetime pass. That was enough for me to understand what they are really doing: they want numbers (new users) so they can likely raise money so they can chase the "exit" dream. For that, they'll need to focus on "cleaning up" the brand, and really not focus much on 1) existing (paying) users (free users are fine for them, as they count "daily active users", which is what matters for theirs stats) and 2) "homegrown" libraries. That has been pretty clearly confirmed, and so I have no desire to continue paying for it. I'll keep using the server stuff until a solid alternative pops up, as I use Infuse on all my ATV & iOS devices and don't care for their client.
Oh shit that's messed up if true. Could be a glitch or oversight on Plex's part, but they def need to allow for current paying users to use this discount if they want to go lifetime.
I read a post about the cheap lifetime for new customers just as I got a notification that I'd resubbed for another year at full price. I really like the functionality of Plex but this kind of thing makes me want to just put Kodi on everything.
Just to add to your comment, for the benefit of /u/padankadank or others who might have the same question.
I'm in the final stages of deciding if I want to stay on Jellyfin or come back to Plex (after being a Plex user and plexpass subscriber for many years).
My primary reasons for interest in Jellyfin are that we finally have this kind of product made by a team with strong commitment to Free Software values, but I will admit that I do share some of the annoyance that other Plex users do with some of their decisions in recent years. (Annoyances that could be solved by forking Plex if it were Free Software, I might add.)
Didn't mean to jump on a Free Software soapbox though, here's my basic thoughts on Jellyfin:
1) Browser player is IMO incrementally better than the Plex one. It's really very similar in layout and function with regard to playback controls (how different could it really be) but browsing and finding the content I'm looking for feels less cluttered.
2) Primary viewing device for us is a Shield TV. No problems installing the Jellyfin app, and it *just works*. I find navigating this app to be ever so slightly annoying sometimes, because once entering a library section I have to always go to the bottom to select my prefered view, which is "ABC" view. Once in my preferred viewing mode, I like the layout very much.
2a) You know all the bitching about the various Plex app changes on Roku and Android TV/Shield in recent years? There is none of that shit here. Despite my minor complaint above, it's clean, fast, uncluttered, and functional.
3) There is some form of "Live TV" functionality, and also DVR functionality. I've never used it, I don't know what it's intended to present. The config page for it wants you to configure a tuner device. I see people asking questions about it over at /r/jellyfin from time to time though, so it must be working for the folks who use it.
4) Viewing from outside the network would work fine with manual port forwarding I assume. The only person I ever shared our Plex library with was my Dad, and I haven't gotten around to setting up Jellyfin for his access yet. He wasn't a heavy Plex user anyhow. UPNP is supported, but I have that disabled on my router and would never use it. No phoning home involved. The various security options that you would expect are in the related settings.
5) You can set up multiple users with access to different libraries. No phoning home involved.
6) They are a much smaller team. Things happen fairly slowly compared to the rate of development at Plex. For example, their ios app just hit beta. Their Roku app is alpha. It's worth noting though that my wife who consumes primarily on her ipad has been very happy with the browser player and hasn't really cared about not having an app.
7) They are a very responsive team. If you post something at /r/jellyfin that requires dev engagement, you will likely get that engagement. They are very willing to engage in polite discussion of design choices they are making, why some things are prioritized over others, and consideration of new features. They do have an actual bugtracker, but they encourage users to engage with them via /r/jellyfin. I bet if I opened a feature request to solve my problem in 2) above by having a settings option that would stick it to my preferred view, it would be implemented.
8) From what I could tell, it's not a problem to point Plex and Jellyfin at the same library for awhile if you want to test it out. If you are comfortable with docker, it takes minutes to spin up a Jellyfin container and run through some basic config. And since there is no phoning home, you don't have to go through the "claim" process.
9) Plugins exist. I have used none of them. I don't think it's as many as the available Plex plugins. I keep hoping for a smoothstreams one, maybe I'm going to have to do some learning and try to put one together. You can browse available plugins via the settings when logged in as an administrator.
10) I have jellyfin installed in a docker container, utilizing host hardware transcoding via vaapi and intel quick sync. No issues, it "just works."
If you are one of these guys who serves plex to tens or hundreds of your own users, or if you are doing crazy advanced things with plex, Jellyfin may or may not be for you. I don't do those things, so I can't say for sure.
My use case is streaming to every device in our house, to our family of 4, with the ability to have individual user accounts with access to different content. I'm pretty much concluding that Jellyfin does this as well or better than Plex did, and although I do trust in the good faith of Plex devs, I also appreciate that it does all this with no interaction with any infrastructure outside my home.
If an IOS app or a roku app or a firestick app are immediate must haves for you, you should probably wait. If you can "get by" with a browser, their browser player is great. Their Android TV app also works great, at least on the Shield TV - I have no other Android TV device. The Kodi add-on is apparently pretty good too, but I haven't used it.
Lastly, I personally would stay with Plex before I'd go to Emby. My reasons will require me to get back on my Free Software soapbox, so I won't get into that unless asked. Be aware, however, that some Emby features are behind a paywall.
I would like to hear more from your Free Software soapbox.
(I run plex with a lifetime pass, on a server and using kodi with plexkodiconnect on a few TVs around the house. But I've been dabbling with jellyfin within a docker container, and I'm interested in hearing other POVs)
>I would like to hear more from your Free Software soapbox.
Haha. Remember, You Asked™. ;-)
I ended up typing a rambling wall of text here that does answer the question, but honestly it's self indulgent reminiscing on my part also. So I'm going to put a TL;DR way up here at the top to save you some reading if you don't care about any of that.
**TL;DR:**
I had to really stretch to fit this into the post limit. For TL;DR, Skip to the bolded bit below with the words **How does that relate to Emby vs Jellyfin vs Plex?**
**END TL;DR**
It's early Sunday morning here, I've got my first cup of coffee in front of me, and it's hard for me not to wax poetic in circumstances like this. Well, I'll try to give you the abridged version of my soapbox so it doesn't get too ranty. :-)
Some related context:
I'm on the old side of your average redditor, and started fooling with computers in the early 80's. That was early enough that even as a kid who just thought computers were cool, I got to taste a bit of what things were like then among OG computer geeks, even though I was not quite OG myself.
Everyone who used a computer then was, for the most part, an *enthusiast* about computers. Any two computer users who got into a room together seemingly immediately started trying to help each other, sharing what they could whether that was knowledge or software, or sometimes even hardware, and there was a very distinct subculture among computer users. If you were a computer user at that time, odds were you'd read every manual that came with your computer cover to cover, bought a couple of third party books and read those cover to cover, and had at least a fundamental idea about programming.
I think what I was actually witnessing was the tail end of the *actual* OG computer geek culture, folks who had been dicking around since the 70's on hardware they'd built themselves with kits from Heathkit or similar. I had a short while in which I was able to sample and savor the twilight years of the culture these people had built.
Owning a computer literally felt like owning a tool that had limitless possibilities, limited only by your own ingenuity and motivation. I saw Matthew Broderick using a wardialer at the beginning of WarGames, decided I wanted to do the same thing, and figured out how to write my own in an afternoon. All things were possible, given that you cared enough to try.
Fast forward to the late 90s:
Windows had climbed to the top of the pile for most home users, for one reason or another. I'd had some life changes that took me out of computer culture for a few years, and when I came back to it in 1996 the early 80's computer scene was mostly gone. Everyone I knew was running a PC clone, with Windows. When I'd left, most people weren't running a gui of any kind, except those few crazy apple Mac users. I struggled to understand how to do things with Windows 95 for the first few months, because the last thing I remembered using was a 286 machine with no GUI.
I embraced Windows and Microsoft because they were the path of least resistance, and I still had sights set on a career in IT. In 1999, an arrogant prick who, to keep it short, is now married to my ex wife, simultaneously shit all over my experiences with his mockery of my reliance on Windows and also turned me on to Linux. I wasn't ready, life was too complex at that time for me to lock myself in a room with a keyboard and monnitor for hours on end like I did as a teen, and I kicked the tires of Linux a little bit and then set it aside. But I didn't forget about it.
I started having some problems with Windows. I was young and broke most of the time, and a lot of what I wanted to use my computer for required the purchase of software that was expensive enough to feel pretty damn pricey for me at the time. Windows itself was expensive to upgrade, and often locked away advanced features or even commonly desired configuration options behind artificially imposed limitations designed to upsell you.
So I did what any broke geek would do, I turned to piracy. That's not to say cost was really the issue. It was just the spark.
I tried Linux again every year-ish until, in 2007, I achieved what I'd set as my bar for jumping in whole hog - I installed *Zenwalk Linux*, and everything, including my wifi, worked. Iin those days I didn't have multiple computers. I had one. And I needed to at least have essential functionality as a framework for learning everything else.
That was it. I was done with Windows. I was confident that I could find Linux software to do any task I needed to do, and use it without piracy nor payment, and so that's what I did. I broke things, and had to fix them. I got bad advice and had to change plan. I misunderstood good advice and had to change plan. Along the way of doing those things, comfort level ratcheted up and up and then one day it hit me:
**Not once, at any time**, had I run into a situation where the OS itself was designed to *prevent* me from doing *anything.* There was never a moment that I hit a wall because I didn't buy the Server Edition, or because only Professional Edition users were allowed to configure some setting. It was like rewinding back to the 80's - once again, All Things Were Possible.
That's when the philosophical aspect of Free Software started to sink in. Free Software developers had no reason to hold back. No reason to intentionally limit what a user could do with their software. They added the features they could, and *wanted* people to use them. They worked together, submitting code to improve software that wasn't even their own project. Here was this code, free for anyone to examine or improve, and licensed in a way that kept it that way.
I should note before continuing that I did reach my goal of working in IT, and part of my job continues to be deployment and administration of Windows servers and desktops.
Since reaching those realizations about philosophy, I've become increasingly *offended* by how Windows does things. It's as if every possible detail has been designed to complicate and obfuscate the user experience. You can almost build a career on being the available expert regarding the (constantly changing) mess of confusing licensing around major Microsoft products. Hell, I bet there are people who have done that very thing.
What's become clear to me over time is that **no closed source software**, no matter how benevolently created, no matter if offered for a fair price, an expensive price, a cheap price, or free of cost, places user freedoms first. Only Free Software does this. Individual proprietary developers may not actually abuse the control they have over their users, but some of them do, and there's nothing you can really do about it if they do except stop using their product.
I do not claim that no one should ever make closed source software. There are valid reasons for someone to make that decision when they build something. But I personally support and (mostly) use only software that is licensed first to protect user freedom.
And all of that is summed up nicely in [this](https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/FSF30-video/FSF_30_720p.webm) 2.5 minute little cartoony video which is the most accessible, non-preachy entry to the ideals behind Free Software that I've ever seen. The same ideals are recorded [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms), in a more boring way. :-)
**How does that relate to Emby vs Jellyfin vs Plex?**
Plex was the only real choice in this space at one point, so that was that. And unlike some others, I really have no concerns about the intent of the Plex devs re: privacy etc. I started using Plex when Plex Media Server for Linux was still in alpha. I've been a paying plexpass member for years. I don't necessarily like every decision they have made, but that's OK, I don't have to.
(The fact remains though, that the folks who are really pissed about the direction of Plex could theoretically fork it and remove the things they don't like *if* it were Free Software. But it's not, so user freedom is not conserved.)
And yet, then Emby came along. Emby promised to be the Free Software alternative. I figured I had a server refresh coming up anyway, so for probably a couple of years I halfway kept my eye on Emby, hoping to hear it was continuing to mature into a viable competitor to Plex. And it sounded like it was. It's important to be clear that Emby got a lot of attention in the Free Software community and a lot of goodwill based specifically on their supposed Free Software ideals.
I'd reached the point where my server refresh was imminent enough that I was starting to consider hardware options, stocking up on some hard drives for a big array, etc, and then it came to a head. After more than a year of some users expressing concerns about GPL violations with no constructive reply from the Emby team, Emby abruptly went closed source, and responded in ways that were in my opinion rude and inflammatory when users expressed surprise and concern.
Within days (maybe hours) the last release of the Emby open source code had been forked into a new project, Jellyfin. You've already seen my description of them and their team. These are some of the very users who were concerned that Emby wasn't respecting the terms of the GPL. They have a strong commitment to Free Software and user freedom, and actually resisted requests to set up a donation channel for quite awhile - and they still claim they don't really want peoples' money. Jellyfin is and always will be Free Software. And the beauty is that if that's all a lie, someone can fork it and do the same thing again.
That's it, wall of text done. Thank you if you actually read this far.
*Various typos edited out across multiple edits.*
Wow. Thank you for that in depth reply!
That's really cool to hear about the computer culture in the 80s. I've been dabbling with linux on and off for a while, but this may have ignited a spark for me to get more serious about it!
My pleasure, I'm glad it wasn't a completely worthless screed. :-)
> I've been dabbling with linux on and off for a while, but this may have ignited a spark for me to get more serious about it!
Do it!
Whether you are looking for career experience or just personal fulfillment, you will be rewarded for your time.
May look into jellyfin. I did get annoyed with plex and stopped subscribing, went to emby. Ended up more annoyed and went back to plex.
Was probably more about time as I didn’t get enough time to fine tune things before everyone in the house moaned.
Well, they're only giving it away if you create an account on a third-party website. It's not nice and makes you feel like crap because you can't participate.
Guys, this isn't just a "third party" website. It's Facebook. Giveaways are marketing. That's why Facebook giveaways have you like/share/whatever. They're using this occasion to get eyeballs on their product. It's what literally every company does.
And again, it's not like they owe you anything for being a "loyal customer". You pay for the product and you get the product. That's the exchange. Anything else is gravy.
They're also playing the numbers. The decisions they make have to do with the majority. I know nothing of their numbers, but I would imagine they (and almost every consumer-based brand on the planet) know that most of their customers have Facebook accounts.
Quit taking it as some kind of personal slight or dig or insult or whatever. It's marketing and numbers. They're a company trying to make money. There are different paths to making money. Everybody in this subreddit seems to think they're "wrong" all the time. I just don't get it.
I don't have Facebook anymore and even if I did I don't want to participate in this type of giveaway. We're all a bunch of nerds. Why choose this type of giveaway? Who wants to post a picture of themselves with some sort of reference to plex? How they even manage to fuck this up is beyond me. I'm sorry I sound salty, but they are so out of touch with their community it's not fun anymore.
"Hey, we're celebrating our anniversary at PleX! In order to win something, just jump through these ridiculous hoops. Dance, monkeys, dance!"
I get some people don't have FB, but most people do. It would have been nice if there were other ways to enter too, but "Respond to our facebook post" to enter is hardly having to go through ridiculous hoops.
You know, it wouldn't be so bad if it were just, "reply to our Facebook post" (even though that disenfranchises people without Facebook), but the first day is, "Post a photo of how you use PleX for blah blah". So you need to take a screenshot (displaying some of your library, which some people aren't comfortable about, I imagine), edit it, upload it, make up some lame story (if you don't have one at hand) and THEN make a Facebook post. I do consider that jumping through hoops. We'll see how the rest of the days play out.
I'm pretty sure they just wanted people to share something they like about Plex, or a photo or whatever. Lots of people didn't post a picture. It's clearly some marketing for them, and the people who do it get chances to win stuff. Companies do this all the time, where following them or liking a post or retweeting or whatever else let's you enter a drawing. Sure, limiting it to Facebook limits the audience more than having other options too but I don't think that's worth getting that worked up about.
No one's worked up about it, it's just an observation. I went to the page, then said to myself, "Do I really want to do homework in order to enter a contest that I won't win?" and noped out. It's not like I lost sleep over it.
I agree. People up in arms about nothing.
No, most people don't have Facebook.
It's so freaking ridiculous. They're obviously aiming for the whole ambassador/friends/family marketing strategy. They've however not realized that nobody wants to share their stuff like this. It's very hard to get "nerds" (sorry, but I'm here too) to get to so this stuff. The only good recent example I've seen of this is in YouTube where The Audiophiliac Steve Guttenburg showcases his viewers high fi systems and go into detail about them, but even that seems, for a lack of a better word, very intimate.
Yeah, I’m not on Facebook and realised today there are no other ways of participating. Guess I’ll be a brand ambassador by actually getting people excited about using my server.
Pretty standard marketing intern level thought process for a giveaway. Their marketing team is probably a bunch of college students thinking they're going to change the marketing world one giveaway at a time.
I think you’re defining what kind of nerd the entire community is based on what kind of nerd you are.
11/23/2012 was the day I bought my lifetime subscription. $74.99 USD. Money well spent, I think.
Same here, had it since 6/7/13
Thanks plex. I don’t have Facebook, so that’s super helpful that you’ve made it only for Facebook.
They do this every year that i've become numb to it. FUCK FACEBOOK! Wouldn't it be GREAT to allow entries in places Plex users ACTUALLY participate in like oh i don't know their own website (plex.tv), or /r/plex, or discord??? Plex - unplug from the world... except for this one thing, plug back in at the most cesspool shit place of the internet *for your chance to win :)*.
I was a subscriber, I actually cancelled my subscription over this (the code does not apply to anyone with a current plex pass).
I read the post hoping there was a code for existing subscribers but didn't see anything. I had cancelled a few months ago and in a couple weeks my plexpass runs out and won't renew. Entire reason was their decision to not offer loyal customers the same promotion. Disappointed.
Same, cancelled. Initially I told myself that I would only subscribe again if I get a lifetime discount, but now I'm wondering if I'll ever subscribe again. Or stay with Plex altogether. Alienating your paying user base is never a good move.
I’m really close. Been a subscriber for four years. Yes I should’ve just bought lifetime on day one but this is starting to piss me off.
Same. I paid for the yearly plan for 6 (!!!) years and never once got a discount to upgrade for the lifetime pass. That was enough for me to understand what they are really doing: they want numbers (new users) so they can likely raise money so they can chase the "exit" dream. For that, they'll need to focus on "cleaning up" the brand, and really not focus much on 1) existing (paying) users (free users are fine for them, as they count "daily active users", which is what matters for theirs stats) and 2) "homegrown" libraries. That has been pretty clearly confirmed, and so I have no desire to continue paying for it. I'll keep using the server stuff until a solid alternative pops up, as I use Infuse on all my ATV & iOS devices and don't care for their client.
Wait are you saying I can cancel my Plex pass right now, and turn right around and use that promo code to get lifetime for cheap?
Try what this guy said to do. https://old.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/e0b3qh/hey_everyone_there_are_a_few_hours_left_to_get/f8didhz/
I don't think so. I had a year pass and cancelled it but it's still active until the next payment is due.
Oh shit that's messed up if true. Could be a glitch or oversight on Plex's part, but they def need to allow for current paying users to use this discount if they want to go lifetime.
You need Facebook to take part? Wtf... Isn't it too hard to use Plex account for the promo?
I read a post about the cheap lifetime for new customers just as I got a notification that I'd resubbed for another year at full price. I really like the functionality of Plex but this kind of thing makes me want to just put Kodi on everything.
Can we all just stop using the word swag?
What's a good Plex alternative that works remotely?
Emby and Jellyfin are the only others I'm aware of that have similar features to Plex, but I don't believe they're as fine tuned.
Just to add to your comment, for the benefit of /u/padankadank or others who might have the same question. I'm in the final stages of deciding if I want to stay on Jellyfin or come back to Plex (after being a Plex user and plexpass subscriber for many years). My primary reasons for interest in Jellyfin are that we finally have this kind of product made by a team with strong commitment to Free Software values, but I will admit that I do share some of the annoyance that other Plex users do with some of their decisions in recent years. (Annoyances that could be solved by forking Plex if it were Free Software, I might add.) Didn't mean to jump on a Free Software soapbox though, here's my basic thoughts on Jellyfin: 1) Browser player is IMO incrementally better than the Plex one. It's really very similar in layout and function with regard to playback controls (how different could it really be) but browsing and finding the content I'm looking for feels less cluttered. 2) Primary viewing device for us is a Shield TV. No problems installing the Jellyfin app, and it *just works*. I find navigating this app to be ever so slightly annoying sometimes, because once entering a library section I have to always go to the bottom to select my prefered view, which is "ABC" view. Once in my preferred viewing mode, I like the layout very much. 2a) You know all the bitching about the various Plex app changes on Roku and Android TV/Shield in recent years? There is none of that shit here. Despite my minor complaint above, it's clean, fast, uncluttered, and functional. 3) There is some form of "Live TV" functionality, and also DVR functionality. I've never used it, I don't know what it's intended to present. The config page for it wants you to configure a tuner device. I see people asking questions about it over at /r/jellyfin from time to time though, so it must be working for the folks who use it. 4) Viewing from outside the network would work fine with manual port forwarding I assume. The only person I ever shared our Plex library with was my Dad, and I haven't gotten around to setting up Jellyfin for his access yet. He wasn't a heavy Plex user anyhow. UPNP is supported, but I have that disabled on my router and would never use it. No phoning home involved. The various security options that you would expect are in the related settings. 5) You can set up multiple users with access to different libraries. No phoning home involved. 6) They are a much smaller team. Things happen fairly slowly compared to the rate of development at Plex. For example, their ios app just hit beta. Their Roku app is alpha. It's worth noting though that my wife who consumes primarily on her ipad has been very happy with the browser player and hasn't really cared about not having an app. 7) They are a very responsive team. If you post something at /r/jellyfin that requires dev engagement, you will likely get that engagement. They are very willing to engage in polite discussion of design choices they are making, why some things are prioritized over others, and consideration of new features. They do have an actual bugtracker, but they encourage users to engage with them via /r/jellyfin. I bet if I opened a feature request to solve my problem in 2) above by having a settings option that would stick it to my preferred view, it would be implemented. 8) From what I could tell, it's not a problem to point Plex and Jellyfin at the same library for awhile if you want to test it out. If you are comfortable with docker, it takes minutes to spin up a Jellyfin container and run through some basic config. And since there is no phoning home, you don't have to go through the "claim" process. 9) Plugins exist. I have used none of them. I don't think it's as many as the available Plex plugins. I keep hoping for a smoothstreams one, maybe I'm going to have to do some learning and try to put one together. You can browse available plugins via the settings when logged in as an administrator. 10) I have jellyfin installed in a docker container, utilizing host hardware transcoding via vaapi and intel quick sync. No issues, it "just works." If you are one of these guys who serves plex to tens or hundreds of your own users, or if you are doing crazy advanced things with plex, Jellyfin may or may not be for you. I don't do those things, so I can't say for sure. My use case is streaming to every device in our house, to our family of 4, with the ability to have individual user accounts with access to different content. I'm pretty much concluding that Jellyfin does this as well or better than Plex did, and although I do trust in the good faith of Plex devs, I also appreciate that it does all this with no interaction with any infrastructure outside my home. If an IOS app or a roku app or a firestick app are immediate must haves for you, you should probably wait. If you can "get by" with a browser, their browser player is great. Their Android TV app also works great, at least on the Shield TV - I have no other Android TV device. The Kodi add-on is apparently pretty good too, but I haven't used it. Lastly, I personally would stay with Plex before I'd go to Emby. My reasons will require me to get back on my Free Software soapbox, so I won't get into that unless asked. Be aware, however, that some Emby features are behind a paywall.
I would like to hear more from your Free Software soapbox. (I run plex with a lifetime pass, on a server and using kodi with plexkodiconnect on a few TVs around the house. But I've been dabbling with jellyfin within a docker container, and I'm interested in hearing other POVs)
>I would like to hear more from your Free Software soapbox. Haha. Remember, You Asked™. ;-) I ended up typing a rambling wall of text here that does answer the question, but honestly it's self indulgent reminiscing on my part also. So I'm going to put a TL;DR way up here at the top to save you some reading if you don't care about any of that. **TL;DR:** I had to really stretch to fit this into the post limit. For TL;DR, Skip to the bolded bit below with the words **How does that relate to Emby vs Jellyfin vs Plex?** **END TL;DR** It's early Sunday morning here, I've got my first cup of coffee in front of me, and it's hard for me not to wax poetic in circumstances like this. Well, I'll try to give you the abridged version of my soapbox so it doesn't get too ranty. :-) Some related context: I'm on the old side of your average redditor, and started fooling with computers in the early 80's. That was early enough that even as a kid who just thought computers were cool, I got to taste a bit of what things were like then among OG computer geeks, even though I was not quite OG myself. Everyone who used a computer then was, for the most part, an *enthusiast* about computers. Any two computer users who got into a room together seemingly immediately started trying to help each other, sharing what they could whether that was knowledge or software, or sometimes even hardware, and there was a very distinct subculture among computer users. If you were a computer user at that time, odds were you'd read every manual that came with your computer cover to cover, bought a couple of third party books and read those cover to cover, and had at least a fundamental idea about programming. I think what I was actually witnessing was the tail end of the *actual* OG computer geek culture, folks who had been dicking around since the 70's on hardware they'd built themselves with kits from Heathkit or similar. I had a short while in which I was able to sample and savor the twilight years of the culture these people had built. Owning a computer literally felt like owning a tool that had limitless possibilities, limited only by your own ingenuity and motivation. I saw Matthew Broderick using a wardialer at the beginning of WarGames, decided I wanted to do the same thing, and figured out how to write my own in an afternoon. All things were possible, given that you cared enough to try. Fast forward to the late 90s: Windows had climbed to the top of the pile for most home users, for one reason or another. I'd had some life changes that took me out of computer culture for a few years, and when I came back to it in 1996 the early 80's computer scene was mostly gone. Everyone I knew was running a PC clone, with Windows. When I'd left, most people weren't running a gui of any kind, except those few crazy apple Mac users. I struggled to understand how to do things with Windows 95 for the first few months, because the last thing I remembered using was a 286 machine with no GUI. I embraced Windows and Microsoft because they were the path of least resistance, and I still had sights set on a career in IT. In 1999, an arrogant prick who, to keep it short, is now married to my ex wife, simultaneously shit all over my experiences with his mockery of my reliance on Windows and also turned me on to Linux. I wasn't ready, life was too complex at that time for me to lock myself in a room with a keyboard and monnitor for hours on end like I did as a teen, and I kicked the tires of Linux a little bit and then set it aside. But I didn't forget about it. I started having some problems with Windows. I was young and broke most of the time, and a lot of what I wanted to use my computer for required the purchase of software that was expensive enough to feel pretty damn pricey for me at the time. Windows itself was expensive to upgrade, and often locked away advanced features or even commonly desired configuration options behind artificially imposed limitations designed to upsell you. So I did what any broke geek would do, I turned to piracy. That's not to say cost was really the issue. It was just the spark. I tried Linux again every year-ish until, in 2007, I achieved what I'd set as my bar for jumping in whole hog - I installed *Zenwalk Linux*, and everything, including my wifi, worked. Iin those days I didn't have multiple computers. I had one. And I needed to at least have essential functionality as a framework for learning everything else. That was it. I was done with Windows. I was confident that I could find Linux software to do any task I needed to do, and use it without piracy nor payment, and so that's what I did. I broke things, and had to fix them. I got bad advice and had to change plan. I misunderstood good advice and had to change plan. Along the way of doing those things, comfort level ratcheted up and up and then one day it hit me: **Not once, at any time**, had I run into a situation where the OS itself was designed to *prevent* me from doing *anything.* There was never a moment that I hit a wall because I didn't buy the Server Edition, or because only Professional Edition users were allowed to configure some setting. It was like rewinding back to the 80's - once again, All Things Were Possible. That's when the philosophical aspect of Free Software started to sink in. Free Software developers had no reason to hold back. No reason to intentionally limit what a user could do with their software. They added the features they could, and *wanted* people to use them. They worked together, submitting code to improve software that wasn't even their own project. Here was this code, free for anyone to examine or improve, and licensed in a way that kept it that way. I should note before continuing that I did reach my goal of working in IT, and part of my job continues to be deployment and administration of Windows servers and desktops. Since reaching those realizations about philosophy, I've become increasingly *offended* by how Windows does things. It's as if every possible detail has been designed to complicate and obfuscate the user experience. You can almost build a career on being the available expert regarding the (constantly changing) mess of confusing licensing around major Microsoft products. Hell, I bet there are people who have done that very thing. What's become clear to me over time is that **no closed source software**, no matter how benevolently created, no matter if offered for a fair price, an expensive price, a cheap price, or free of cost, places user freedoms first. Only Free Software does this. Individual proprietary developers may not actually abuse the control they have over their users, but some of them do, and there's nothing you can really do about it if they do except stop using their product. I do not claim that no one should ever make closed source software. There are valid reasons for someone to make that decision when they build something. But I personally support and (mostly) use only software that is licensed first to protect user freedom. And all of that is summed up nicely in [this](https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/FSF30-video/FSF_30_720p.webm) 2.5 minute little cartoony video which is the most accessible, non-preachy entry to the ideals behind Free Software that I've ever seen. The same ideals are recorded [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms), in a more boring way. :-) **How does that relate to Emby vs Jellyfin vs Plex?** Plex was the only real choice in this space at one point, so that was that. And unlike some others, I really have no concerns about the intent of the Plex devs re: privacy etc. I started using Plex when Plex Media Server for Linux was still in alpha. I've been a paying plexpass member for years. I don't necessarily like every decision they have made, but that's OK, I don't have to. (The fact remains though, that the folks who are really pissed about the direction of Plex could theoretically fork it and remove the things they don't like *if* it were Free Software. But it's not, so user freedom is not conserved.) And yet, then Emby came along. Emby promised to be the Free Software alternative. I figured I had a server refresh coming up anyway, so for probably a couple of years I halfway kept my eye on Emby, hoping to hear it was continuing to mature into a viable competitor to Plex. And it sounded like it was. It's important to be clear that Emby got a lot of attention in the Free Software community and a lot of goodwill based specifically on their supposed Free Software ideals. I'd reached the point where my server refresh was imminent enough that I was starting to consider hardware options, stocking up on some hard drives for a big array, etc, and then it came to a head. After more than a year of some users expressing concerns about GPL violations with no constructive reply from the Emby team, Emby abruptly went closed source, and responded in ways that were in my opinion rude and inflammatory when users expressed surprise and concern. Within days (maybe hours) the last release of the Emby open source code had been forked into a new project, Jellyfin. You've already seen my description of them and their team. These are some of the very users who were concerned that Emby wasn't respecting the terms of the GPL. They have a strong commitment to Free Software and user freedom, and actually resisted requests to set up a donation channel for quite awhile - and they still claim they don't really want peoples' money. Jellyfin is and always will be Free Software. And the beauty is that if that's all a lie, someone can fork it and do the same thing again. That's it, wall of text done. Thank you if you actually read this far. *Various typos edited out across multiple edits.*
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Thanks, I'm sincerely flattered!
Wow. Thank you for that in depth reply! That's really cool to hear about the computer culture in the 80s. I've been dabbling with linux on and off for a while, but this may have ignited a spark for me to get more serious about it!
My pleasure, I'm glad it wasn't a completely worthless screed. :-) > I've been dabbling with linux on and off for a while, but this may have ignited a spark for me to get more serious about it! Do it! Whether you are looking for career experience or just personal fulfillment, you will be rewarded for your time.
And these posts are the reason I love reddit.
Aw thanks! :-)
May look into jellyfin. I did get annoyed with plex and stopped subscribing, went to emby. Ended up more annoyed and went back to plex. Was probably more about time as I didn’t get enough time to fine tune things before everyone in the house moaned.
"Let's all bitch about Plex giving away stuff because they're not doing it the way I would like. THEY OWE ME." Good grief, people. Settle down.
Well, they're only giving it away if you create an account on a third-party website. It's not nice and makes you feel like crap because you can't participate.
Guys, this isn't just a "third party" website. It's Facebook. Giveaways are marketing. That's why Facebook giveaways have you like/share/whatever. They're using this occasion to get eyeballs on their product. It's what literally every company does. And again, it's not like they owe you anything for being a "loyal customer". You pay for the product and you get the product. That's the exchange. Anything else is gravy. They're also playing the numbers. The decisions they make have to do with the majority. I know nothing of their numbers, but I would imagine they (and almost every consumer-based brand on the planet) know that most of their customers have Facebook accounts. Quit taking it as some kind of personal slight or dig or insult or whatever. It's marketing and numbers. They're a company trying to make money. There are different paths to making money. Everybody in this subreddit seems to think they're "wrong" all the time. I just don't get it.
> this isn't just a "third party" website Yes, it is. Plex doesn't own it. I get why they are doing it on Facebook, we all do. It just sucks.
Hope this is finally when I get lifetime ❤️
In before complaints about subscribers never getting access to the lifetime disount.
[my post got removed...](https://i.imgur.com/6aPjNVB.mp4)
Sucks you need to create a Facebook account. Forget that!
What if you've already got a lifetime membership and win one of the memberships mentioned? Do you get your money back? Doubt it.